


Consequences

by brightly_lit



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel and Kids, Castiel in the Bunker, Cute Kids, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Humor, Men of Letters Bunker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 07:20:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8523766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightly_lit/pseuds/brightly_lit
Summary: Soulless Sam got around quite a bit, and never faced a consequence ... until now.





	

There was a knock at the Bunker door. Sam and Dean’s heads shot up. They looked at each other.

“What the hell?” said Dean. “Who knocks??”

They got out their guns and crept up to it. “Too bad the Bunker doesn’t have a peephole,” Dean growled.

“Maybe we should set up a camera.”

“We never needed one before!”

Sam threw open the door ... and immediately hid his gun behind him, slipping it in the waistband of his pants. Dean followed suit, staring wonderingly at him ... and at the woman glaring at him, holding a five-year-old child. “There you are,” she hissed. “I’ve been looking for you for six years. You thought you’d slipped me, didn’t you, and all your responsibilities. But I finally found you, Sam Winchester, you son of a bitch.” She thrust the kid at him; Sam automatically took her. “‘Vasectomy,’ my ass,” the woman muttered as she turned and stalked back to her car.

“Hey, um,” Dean said, stepping into the doorway, “looks like you forgot something!” 

The woman threw back a middle finger, got in her car, and peeled out.

Dean turned to look at Sam, who was staring blankly after her. “Something you forgot to tell me, Sam?”

 

The little girl was happily downing astonishing volumes of Dean’s favorite cereal. In between nervous glances into the kitchen where she sat on a high stool at the kitchen table, getting the stuff freakin’ everywhere, Dean interrogated Sam. 

“Dean, seriously, I have no idea what she’s talking about.”

“Well, she knew your name, and it looked like she recognized you.”

“She must have gotten me confused with some other guy she ....”

“Yeah, she really didn’t seem like your usual type,” Dean said merrily. “You usually like ’em a little classier than that.” Dean gazed into the kitchen again. Was the kid going to eat every last morsel of Dean’s cereal?! “Kid does look like you, though,” Dean noted absently.

“Well, she can’t be mine. I think I’d remember that--” He cut himself off suddenly, staring at the girl, eyes darting around, calculating. “‘Six years,’ she said.” Comical anxiety gripped his expression.

What about six years? Six years ago, Sam was ... “Soulless,” Dean said. He couldn’t help chortling. “Man, you got around,” Dean said, punching him approvingly on the arm. “And a vasectomy story? Sounds like soulless-you.”

“This isn’t funny!” Sam hissed, “because if there’s one, there could be--”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dean waved him off. “The Bunker was designed to be practically invisible; that’s why it’s mostly underground and in the middle of nowhere. I’ve probably got dozens of kids running around out there, myself, and we’ve never heard anything about them,” he bragged, cut off by an irritable Sam.

“You don’t get around as much as you like to think, and I know you’re smart enough to use protection ... most of the time,” Sam snapped.

“Yeah ... I thought soulless you was supposed to be really smart.”

“He was,” Sam said diffidently. “He was also ... pragmatic. And very selfish. Maybe he was willing to take a few calculated risks.”

“Let’s hope it was really only a few,” Dean said.

 

Camille was really pretty easy to deal with. She cried a little that first night, missing her mom, but her mom must have sloughed her off on any number of people over the years, because she settled into her new life at the Bunker happily enough, playing in its multitudinous rooms, running down its halls, enjoying the sound of her feet slapping against the smooth floors. There were some children’s books in its library for some reason, and she could be entertained for hours reading them, telling herself and the stuffed lion she arrived with stories, and drawing on some paper Dean dug out that he hoped didn’t have magical properties, such as bringing whatever was drawn upon it to life. He kept an extra sharp eye out for strange goings-on about the bunker, but there was nothing unusual, except that its depressing silence was now broken by the cheerful chattering of a little kid.

“What’re we gonna do with her?” Dean asked for the umpteenth time.

“We’ll try Jody,” Sam said uncertainly.

“She’s got two troubled teenaged girls who are a handful, and she’s chief of police. You think she wants to take on a little kid, too?”

Sam shrugged helplessly.

“You need to learn to take responsibility for your actions.” Dean just couldn’t resist ribbing him about his indiscretions as often as possible, but apparently this was already a sore spot with the hyper-responsible Sam, very much at the forefront of his thoughts.

“Great, Dean,” he hissed, “great idea. You want to raise another hunter like Dad raised us? That’s what you want to happen to that little girl? And how? Just take her along with us on our hunts to get killed by any monster who finds her waiting in the car? Or leave her in some hotel room all alone at five? Even Dad didn’t do that, Dean.”

“I’m just sayin’, you play you pay.” He just couldn’t help himself. Dean had gotten into so many scrapes over the years, but Sam had always been straight and narrow, and yet who was the one who had a surprise child show up after all these years? Hilarious.

“Dean! This is serious! What are we gonna do??”

“There’s also Donna.”

“It’s a woman’s problem, huh? Hand her off to any woman we know?”

“Every guy we know is a hunter! Or a ... demon or something.”

“Well ... there’s Garth.”

“The werewolf?”

“He’s still a ... family guy.”

“I’m not letting my niece live with a pack of werewolves!” Dean watched her waving around a stick that looked like a wand, pretending to cast magic spells on her lion. Wait a minute--that _was_ a wand. Dean snatched it out of her hand. Before she could cry, he replaced it with a pencil, whereupon she went right back to her fantasy. “Well ... she’s pretty easy to handle, honestly,” Dean said. “She’s easier than you were, and you were easier than Ben.” And everyone was easier than Dean, according to Dad. “She’s not hurting anything.”

To make certain this remained the case, Sam and Dean instituted a rule that she had to ask before playing with anything new. Dean soon enjoyed the role of the permissive parent, as he said she could play with anything he wasn’t sure was dangerous, while strict ol’ Sam to the contrary only let her play with things he was sure _weren’t_ dangerous. 

Still, Sam was somehow her favorite. She curled up on his lap at night when he liked to just sit in one of the bunker’s many old-fashioned easy chairs and read. She asked him to read aloud what he was reading, which he did--usually some dry research--and before long Sam would read her a book for kids, and she’d fall asleep there in his arms after she’d had her ‘bedtime story.’ He’d go on reading his own books until he was ready for bed, upon which he’d carry her to one of the bunker’s many bedrooms and tuck her in.

Camille’s mom must’ve really sucked, because a week into her tenure in the boringest library in the world in nowhere, Kansas, with its dungeon and warding and general reputation as ground zero for all supernatural goings-on, Camille announced that she wanted to stay there forever. Sam and Dean looked at each other. “Maybe we can just take her by Jody’s any time we have a case,” Dean suggested uncertainly.

 

The second time there was a knock, Sam already looked nervous--with good reason, as another angry mother handed him a five-year-old boy. “He’s as much trouble as you,” she hissed. “Now he’s your problem.”

“Wait,” Dean called after her. “How’d you find us?”

“Word’s getting around,” she declared victoriously.

She wasn’t kidding about him being a handful. When Dean teased Sam mercilessly about this, Sam noted coolly that the kid did, after all, have a lot of Dean’s genes. Still, Dean liked a wild kid. When they both charged through the bunker’s hallways, hollering and brandishing centuries-old relics, Sam didn’t seem to feel like he was in a position to complain.

 

“If all these chicks are giving you their kids, how many are keeping ’em?” Dean chortled. Two more had arrived. Apparently there was some kind of Facebook support group. Sam had found it and had been pale and silent for several hours after reading the thing; Dean could only imagine the what these women were saying there about him. 

“Most,” Sam said tightly.

“More on the way?”

Sam’s grimace said it all.

 

Lacey sat on Cas’s lap, tugging his tie. “That’s my tie,” he informed her, continually interrupting himself as he tried to fill Sam and Dean in on details of what he thought might be a case. “It goes around my neck. Humans need air to breathe, which passes between their nose and their lungs, via their neck. Please stop tightening it.”

She giggled and stuck her finger up his nose.

Grabbing her hand impatiently and forcibly removing it from the vicinity of his nostril, he got only three more words out related to the case before Owen took a running jump and landed full force right on Cas. His breath huffed out audibly. “That’s--that’s really quite--if I weren’t an angel, that could’ve--” Camille came up behind him and started dancing her stuffed lion on his head.

“They love ya,” Dean observed. They really did. Something about his sweet haplessness and incapacity to actually enforce any kind of discipline attracted them irresistably, or maybe it was his angelic aura. Dean and Sam exchanged a look, and as one, they started edging toward the garage. “You know, Sam and me really need to get to work on that case, so ....”

“Ow. That’s my finger. Why are you pulling it? You seem to be expecting some kind of concurrent noise, but pulled fingers make no sound. Well, I suppose the knuckle might make a small pop, if there’s air in the cartilage ....” 

They were on the road before he even noticed they were gone.

 

Dean looked at Cas through the video chat on his phone. He looked like a (beleaguered) Christmas tree, only all the ornaments were children. Cas was talking through the delighted squeals of Sam’s suddenly large brood. “Another one arrived this morning. I was created to be a soldier, not a nanny--”

“Oh, but you have so many talents, Cas,” Dean interrupted him. “You’re doin’ great. Me ’n’ Sam’ll be back in ten days, tops.” Dean looked at Sam. “Ten?”

“Ten, twelve at the most,” Sam agreed diffidently.

“Yeah, this case, really a stinker,” Dean said. “Tough nut to crack. But we’re workin’ on it. I’m sure we’ll have a breakthrough soon.” Dean rummaged for his other burger under the pile of DVDs that Sam had picked up on the hotel-room bed. They’d already made it halfway through The Walking Dead (hilariously unrealistic, but entertaining) in two days.

“Speaking of ‘stinkers,’ Sam,” said Cas, “one of your children is emitting a foul odor ....”

“It’s probably nothing,” Sam said quickly. “Put ’im in the bath and I’m sure it’ll go away.”

“Can’t an angel magic that kind of thing away?” Dean asked, shoving a fry in his piehole after a big bite of burger.

“Since I don’t know the source, I can’t--”

“Well, you just keep at it,” Dean said with a grin.

“You’re doing great,” Sam added, gesturing for Dean to hurry up so they could finish the episode.

Dean ended the call and reclined on the hotel bed, getting comfortable. “You know, I don’t know what everyone’s always complaining about,” Dean said. “Having kids is great! Now that we have Cas to help out ....”

“And now that we’ve locked them out of all the rooms that have dangerous stuff in them ....”

“Yeah,” Dean said fondly. “They love that dungeon.”

“It’s cute, isn’t it?”

“Some of ’em seem to be figuring out hunting all on their own! Did you hear Lizzie reciting the exorcism the other day?”

“Yeah, adorable. Except that if there’d really been a demon there, she wouldn’t have exorcised it; she’d have cursed it only to quack for eternity.” Dean looked at him curiously. “A pronunciation thing,” Sam explained, shrugging.

“Ah.” Dean imagined it for a moment. “Could be useful.”

Sam looked at him disbelievingly. “Really, Dean?”

“All right, maybe not ‘useful,’ but ‘hilarious.’" Dean got out a piece of paper and a pen. "What’s the Latin word for ‘quack’? Don’t want to forget it. See? The kids are already helping us become better hunters.”

“Okay, but hurry up; this DVD isn’t gonna watch itself.”

 

Back at the bunker, some weeks later, there was another knock. Dean shook off a kid who was clinging to his leg and went to answer it. “Seriously, Sam?” he growled. “Didn’t you say you were hunting during that time? How’d you have time for anything but unprotected sex?”

“Didn’t sleep!” Sam reminded him from the next room.

“Oh, right,” Dean grumbled, throwing open the door to reveal what he expected: a woman holding a child ... only this child was blond, and only about three years old.

“Dean Winchester,” she hissed. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you ....”

 

~ The End ~


End file.
